Saturday, September 10, 2011

Ducktales, Season Three, Episode Three: "Bubbeo and Juliet"

Bubbeo was restless he was ready to killHe jumped out the window 'cause he couldn't keep stillJuliet was waitin' with a safety netSaid "don't bury me 'cause I'm not dead yet"

So some white-trash lottery winners move in next to Scrooge, provoking an amazingly élitist reaction on Scrooge's part--natural, perhaps--and, it seems to me, also on the writers' part: although it's true that their feud is laid bare as childish and pointless at the end, the fact remains that we are pretty clearly meant to see the new neighbors' behavior as, at best, tasteless, and the restoration of the status quo (inevitable in a show like this, of course, but doesn't that in itself represent an embedded tendency towards a particular politics?) as the natural order re-asserting itself.

Blah, whatever. The other plot concerns Bubba having a crush on the daughter of these interlopers (hot duck-on-dogface action!), but when they realize how much their families hate each other and how untenable the whole thing is, they commit mutual suicide. Unless I hallucinated that last part, but really, what are the chances of that?

I suppose this episode really isn't terrible; the Scrooge-vs.-new-neighbors dueling thing is reminiscent of the Donald/Jones fights of old, and there's a cool part where Scrooge and HDL are imagining how they get get their revenge, and their fantasies take the form of highly stylized versions of the characters, showing a concern with aesthetics rarely seen on this show.

So yeah, okay, mostly painless.

Stray Observations

-"Now boys--you had a whole summer off; time to start fifth grade!" I know HDL's ages are a bit on the indeterminate side, but I can't resist trotting this Barks image out:

-"You won ten million dollars gambling?!? You didn't work for it?!?" Seriously, dude, give it a break. If that's a big problem you have, there are many, many people you should get pissed off at before lottery winners.

-"Wow! What a fastball! Nobody's ever gotten a strike against Bruiser before!" As in "Time Teasers," the show evinces a certain ignorance of how percentages work in baseball.

-"It cost me two hundred fifty dollars to get out of jail this time!" …and also, an ignorance of how bail works.

-To disrupt pigman's party (I didn't note the new neighbors' names--sorry!), Scrooge starts playing the bagpipes, which pigman counters with an accordion. Yeah, this is a particular bête noire of mine, but seriously, writers: FUCK. YOU.

3 comments:

The $250 to get out of jail doesn't necessarily have to be bail money. The owl judge could have fined Scrooge the $250 (it's lucky he didn't charge him a diamond mine), and he had to pay the fine to be released. Or Scrooge might have had to play the corruption game that strangles Duckburg's local government. A clerk might've said something like, "So, Scrooge, if I were somehow to get $250 from you, by some odd coincidence the paperwork behind your arrest might somehow... disappear..."

And Julie and her family aren't "dogface," they're porcine. Is that why you called them "white trash?" Some "other white meat" thing?